Mac OS X Versus Windows Vista, The Rematch

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek follows up its widely read review where Mac OS X beat out Windows Vista in a head-to-head comparison, with a reader debate on which is really the superior operating system. From the article: 'Mac users love venting about Windows... Any company that calls their techs "geniuses" thrive in forums like this. They think they are "cool" and "hip," they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes. Windows Vista all the way. If Windows sucks soooo much, how come more people are familiar with it than Mac OS X? Last time I checked, Windows wasn't just a business operating system. Tons upon tons of people use it and like it.'"

Comments

They submitter sould have saved themselves

[geekoid]

some effort if they just submitted:
"MS/Apple flamewar. Begin."

Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves

[Funkcikle]

Oh God. I hope nobody sees this article and gets all worked up. That would be awful.

Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves

[rblancarte]

Too late.

Overall, as a PC user, I really like to see the benefits of OS-X. To the chagrin of some of my friends, I actually plan on adding a Mac to my computer inventory very soon. I really like the system and think it has a good look/feel to it. Though a lot of my friends have knocked Apple quality and their lack of pre-announcement of products, instead letting a user blow $2k on a new laptop that they don't know in a week will be lower in price or that the same $2k would get twice the system the next week.

That being said, I really like XP, and due to the underwhelming interest in Vista, I think I am going to be sticking with XP for a while. I just don't see the need to upgrade to Vista right now.

RonB

Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves

[Funkcikle]

See, I don't think "articles" and "debates" like the one in TFA are even remotely targeted at you - the demographic is squarely those people who, for some reason or other, want to talk and fight (online) about a product. You are clearly too level-headed and sensible. Not once in your comment did you write "FFS MAC IS GAY" or "OMG XP SUCKS".

You probably shouldn't even be using a computer...

Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves

[nonsequitor]

9 out of 10 homosexuals prefer MacOS!

The parent poster is hardly a troll, knowing many homosexuals, I think this is accurate, considering most are style conscious and/or artists, MacOS fits their needs.

What I think he meant to troll with was "9 out of 10 MacOS users prefer homosexuals," there, fixed it for you.

(This is gonna kill my karma)

Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves

[Omestes]

When? I haven't heard any refer to their computer as "hip", regardless the OS. But if we want to troll, lets at least troll fairly, Windows users call their boxes "1337", and Linux folk call their boxes "boxen", so there.

And yes, I've called my MacMini sexy before, and I called my XP box a whole large assortment of names, most of which aren't worth saying in polite company, but then again my iBook was just named "bitch", until I installed Ubuntu on it, now it is just Annie the Isolate, since it can't communicate with anything.

Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves

[mikewolf]

i've normally had windows machines, but over the holidays i added a mac mini to my collection of computers, and i've got to say that the initial set up of the machine was SO much easier than any computer i've ever set up that i was sold from the first minute. i plugged it in, hooked it up to my television, and turned it on, it then proceded to tell me i didn't have any input devices plugged it, and it would look for bluetooth devices. it recognized the bluetooth keyboard and mouse available in its area, and proceded to tell me how to sync the 2 devices. it then recognized my cell phone (which has blue tooth access as well), and synced up to that. It then found all of the wifi networks and asked me if i wanted to set up a connection to any of them. It was the fastest and easiest setup i've ever had with a computer. i'm still getting used to some of the interface differences between OSX and Windows, but i've got to say it is still the easiest computer to use that i've ever had. there is a lot of recognizable consistency in the OSX interface that windows is lacking. It is built for normal people to use and administer, while still allowing more technical users to be do advanced os management (which really helped me get started, b/c i hadn't used a unix box in 5 years, and only have minimal linux/bsd experience). anyways, i've got to say that the ease of use alone was enough for me to decide to use it as my main computer from now on.

Re:They submitter sould have saved themselves

[Bega]

As a matter of fact, I just wrote about this in a blog, on the topic of Windows vs OSX;

There's one thing annoys the hell out of me with Windows. It's not Windows per se -- but it's the constant brainfarts I feel that Microsoft made when designing their product. That's actually one reason why I switched over to Apple, because when I'm OSX, it can take days before the OS itself has something to tell me, or I notice the OS itself. I know, these are some incredibly small things and many people might think that I shouldn't be using a computer at all , but for me, some of these things are really frustrating and they make the user experience worse.

Now, I don't mean to start the traditional Windows vs OS X war, but here are a few points I have noticed with my somewhat long experience with working in Windows -- the most recent one that I came to think about is how XP for instance is nagging about cleaning up your desktop icons, *even when they're hidden*. I know for one thing that I usually use the desktop for alot of stuff, and hide the icons because I rarely have to use it anyway, and this is something that I feel that Windows is screwing up with; it doesn't take into account the things you have done, e.g. hid your desktop icons.

Then, let's take another thing -- dialogs. The thing that strikes me with the dialog boxes in Windows is that they rarely tell you in a coherent way what the dialog does. Of course, you have the usual "The text in the file X has changed. Do you want to save changes?" dialog box -- with Yes, No and Cancel buttons. This is just normal, right? Usually, the normal user would just click the button that they think is the right choice -- and I think anybody who has worked as computer support knows, that when people work a little bit longer with computers, they stop reading the dialogs and go with routine -- and this usually ends up in something being lost; "I clicked that one button and it disappeared". Another example of stupid dialog boxes is the WinXP Safe Mode prompt, when you get to choose whether you want to go to Safe Mode or System Recovery; "Press Yes to continue to Safe Mode, No to go to System Recovery", followed with a dialog box filled with a lot of text. What I do like, is the OSX way of dialog boxes; they have the same text, usually, but instead of having a generic Yes/No/Cancel-selection of buttons, the buttons themselves are captioned by what they do when you press them -- e.g. "Save/Don't Save/Cancel".

As with Vista, the user access control is another nice feature, that I'm puzzled over what it's supposed to do. Sure, it's supposed to have your attention when a program wants to do something what the program isn't supposed to do. I've grown a bit tired in "authenticating" -- or to put it more accurately -- "approving" the actions programs want to take. I'll go to the Task Manager, start up the Resource Monitor - I get to click the approve button there already once. I wish to install Firefox? Sure, after I approve.

Of course -- after the initial installation, I'm being bombarded with tips, tricks, tutorials and balloon tips what I can and can't do. There isn't even a checkbox anywhere, that I have the possibility to tell the System that "Yes, I have used Windows before and I would not like to receive any notification [about new features]." This is the thing that frustrates me -- the System is so in my face the whole time, that it distracts me from the work I'm supposed to do, instead of babysitting the computer.

But this is just me. I'm sure there are somebody who agrees with these things and some others that think that maybe I should stop using computers. Maybe I should -- because with the current usability and frustration, I think we'd be better off.

Oh this will end well....

[snoozerdss]

Tandy DeskMate 3.69 kicks all ass! ;)

informal tone

[otacon]

If Windows sucks soooo much, how come more people are familiar with it than Mac OS X? How am I supposed to take this person's opinion seriously when they speak in a 13 year old's tone?

Re:Appletalk?

[oncee]

The only reason to use Appletalk would be because you have an extremely old printer that didn't do TCP/IP. Appletalk is pretty much dead after OS X came around.

Irony

[greysky]

From the article:

I can't wait until the first Mac Virus hits... I want to see how cool Mac OS X is then.

Is it just me, or does anyone else see this statement as just a little ironic?

Re:Appletalk?

[happyemoticon]

I was listening to an episode of LUG Radio where they were doing some evaluation of OS X (predictably, some loved it, others not so much, and one guy hated it just because it was proprietary.

Many of the criticisms of OS X they struck off as irrelevant or persnickety went like this: "Why is the CD Eject button on the keyboard? That's clearly inferior to having a button on the actual drive."

Well, hardly, because if we lived in a strange alternate universe were Apple ruled the market people would be criticizing IBM clones for having the button on the drive. Most people's complaints about OS X fall under this category. Now, if you were to make some criticisms of Finder (my pet peeves are the network disconnects, its overly-glam and non-utilitarian appearance, and its occasional sluggishness and inconsistency as it attempts to combine the worst of a relational and non-relational browsers) you might have something, and you're out of luck if you want to play any cutting edge games aside from WoW. But if you're going to carry on about how it's an inferior OS because you don't like that shade of gray, then you're a certified fanboy.

Re:Appletalk?

[soft_guy]

I am glad that Windows tech support guys didn't become physicians - their idea of drumming up business would be to break people's kneecaps with a hammer.

Re:We may *use* windows, but like it?

[soft_guy]

No one on Slashdot is female. Anyone claiming to be female is lying.

Re:Appletalk?

[Cerebus]

"Why perms get mangled is beyond me, I don't seem to have that problem on my Linux systems..."

Mostly this is because some developers insist on using brain-dead installers, even when a proper appdir is all that's needed. I even had one installer that did a chmod 0777 on /System/Library/StartupItems...*not* a good idea.

Re:Appletalk?

[gobbo]

And I suspect I would get used to it eventually and not mind it any longer if I used Macs routinely. Heck, maybe there's a good reason to be unable to maximize a window as I'm used to doing. I grant that the user paradigm is different, and that I don't know it well at all.

You've hit it exactly, it's a different paradigm. Since Mac applications only run one instance, windows are attached to the application. The green button isn't a maximize button, as the windows on a Mac are supposed to interleave, as part of a system-wide integration that allows for things like truly useful drag-n-drop. The green button 'zooms,' using a a snap-to-fit-content approach, and toggling with a user-defined setting. In other words, if you want to maximize a window, just size it manually, then it should remember that--but you lose some of the aforementioned integration. Personally, snap-to-content makes a hell of a lot of sense to me, when it works (depends on the quality of app: MS products are notoriously bad at this, e.g.). You know you're really using a Mac to good effect when you're moving stuff effortlessly from window to window, app to app, and treating windows like children of parent applications.

But it sure did make me uncomfortable back when I did occasionally have to use a Mac at work. Especially as this was back in the "circular hockey puck mouse" days.

That puck is the worst mouse ever made. The first thing I do to a new Mac (dozens or hundreds since '90), is get a real 3+ button mouse or trackball on it--contextual clicking is reasonably well integrated into the OS. The second thing is to set up proper keyboard powers, through Keyquencer in the old days (I miss that app) and Quicksilver and Automater now.

RULE: never trust a computer as it comes from the factory, it isn't finished and it is commercially sabotaged.